Week 46: Deutsche Charm
A quick trip down to Berlin, and a new article on Baltic trains
I’ve been in Berlin this weekend. Despite using my time in Sweden over the past three years to easily hop around the continent, this was my first time in Germany. Which has been an obvious oversight. Especially given – like most of my favourite places in the world – Berlin feels like you are at the centre of something.
While in Berlin I was able to meet up with my friend Aditi Mukund, who is in the city on a fellowship at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Initially when I started this Substack I had the idea to write a series of profiles on interesting researchers working in the foreign policy space. I wrote on profile on Aditi, but then the idea slipped away from me – much to my regret.
Aside from taking me to get dosas at Saravanaa Bhavan, Aditi was also an excellent tour guide – having rapidly become a local Berliner – walking me around to various sites that I would have not usually seen. Given my love of metro systems I would have otherwise spent my entire time underground on the U-Bahn.
Although I flew into Berlin, I will be making my way back to Sweden via train – from Berlin to Hamburg and then on to Copenhagen, where I can pick up a local train over into Sweden. There is currently a new dual road and rail tunnel being constructed between Germany and Denmark. When completed the a train journey between Hamburg and Copenhagen will be cut from four hours and 40 minutes to 2 and half hours. Although the tunnel is between Germany and Denmark, it is mostly being driven by Sweden – who want more direct access to Germany for freight trains.
This is makes it an interesting topic to write about. But in order to do so I figure I should take the long way first.
Train of Fought
Speaking of articles about train journeys, over the over the weekend I had a piece published in Foreign Policy magazine on trains in the Baltic states. Regular readers may recall that at the end of July I took a train from Tallinn to Riga – or two trains, with a four-hour wait between them at the border. As I mentioned I’d hoped to write a more substantive article about the various ideas that the region’s current trains, and the future Rail Baltica project, represent. It just took me a little while to pull my various notes together, sit down, concentrate and get it done. Which I managed to do last weekend.
Here is a gift link to the article.
Yet ideals are often too intangible to protect against belligerent forces. Collective security relies on the practical, everyday aspects of integration. Values require being reinforced by interests—by the flow of goods, services, people, and culture. Central to those interests is Europe’s extensive network of train lines. The train has always been a potent symbol of European integration, its lines the veins of the continent, and crisscrossing the Schengen Area a demonstration of individual freedom, cosmopolitanism, and cooperative spirit.
Yet for the Baltics, there’s a problem.
Although, the actual gestation of this article has be far longer. In the northern hemisphere summer of 2022 I’d made my way from Warsaw via bus through Vilnius, Riga and to Tallinn. At the time this was the easiest way to get around the region. As I mention in the article, since December last year there is now a direct train between Vilnius and Riga. Yet it was on this trip that the overarching lens of the piece was formed.
I was in a store in Tallinn dedicated to local designers. In it I’d found a jumper that I liked and was being indecisive about whether to buy it or not. While procrastinating I started chatting with the shop assistant. She asked me what I was doing in Tallinn, and I mentioned that I was based in Sweden half the year, and that whenever I hope around the continent I am looking for things to write about.
She took this as a cue, and brought up a video on YouTube of the Baltic Way – the 690km human chain that was formed in 1989 through the Baltics in protest against the Soviet occupation. I knew immediately that was my hook. The Baltic Way was a metaphor for Rail Baltica – replacing hands with railway sleepers.
However, I struggled to make the idea work. Every few months I would try to write it, yet get nowhere. It was only after returning to Estonia and Latvia this year that the idea started to take better shape. But then in November the final hook fell into place.
One of the Baltic Way’s objectives was to force Moscow to admit to the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – the agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to carve up Europe. The pact that allowed the Soviets to move into and subjugate the Baltics. After regaining independence in the 1990s and subsequently joining NATO, the Baltics have been insulated from Russia aggression – affording them the security to pursue a project like Rail Baltica. Yet the election of Donald Trump – with his hostility towards NATO – creates the spectre of a new grand bargain that threatens the region.